On both of the new graphics cards I bought Sim City 4 is far more choppy when scrolling the map, and the music is choppy as well. My first card was a 9800Pro 128MB(shipped with the PC), and it ran Sim City 4 well. The troubles came when I got an X1650PRO 512MB, and now even on my X1950PRO 256MB. The game is not as smooth when scrolling around the map. It jumps frequently(choppy), and the music constantly skips(like a scrathed CD, but no reapeating syndrome). I never had this trouble on my 9800Pro. I thought that when I switched back to a card with a 256 bit bus things would be normal again. I did find a list of GPU's in the game folder. It doesn't list any X1K cards. I was thinking this may be the problem, but I don't know what to enter in the file.

Apart from updating ATI drivers to the latest one, there is not much you can do. Perhaps modded drivers, Omega drivers?

Sim's 4 is a very low spec game, you shouldn't be getting lag at all, but you mentioned skipping in sound, this indicates a CPU bottleneck more than a graphical one, and P4 Prescotts are more than crappy for today's standards.

I had the EXACT same problem, the problem is ATI cards. I had an x800 for the longest time, running on a 4000+, I ran the game with a nvidia card and its absolutely flawless now. If theres one thing I know for sure, it's that SC4 does NOT work for crap with ATI cards, no matter what drivers you have, Omega or not, I tried them all. Run it in software mode man, it will always be faster than an ATI card, even if its 2900XT's in crossfire, it will run like crap. Put any nvidia card in there and it will run perfectly. As long as it above a Geforce4 or so. The difference between an ATI card and Nvidia card on the same system will be greater than night and day.

Here's an example of ATi vs nVidia on a game.
The Sims 2 I used a 7600GS which ran pretty smooth still choppy with max settings but didn't cope when there were alot of NPCs.
ATi X1950pro copes well with more NPC's but pauses so too much as soon as textures and shadows are set to high.

So it's an optimiztaion issue for ATi's latest cards with certain games.

The game always runs fine, until the city gets big, but I ran a big city with my ATI card, then as soon as I put the 7950 in, I tried the same city out, and it ran fine. It's got a lot to do with cpu, too. Sim City 3 and 4 ran kinda garbagish on pretty much any system, along with the sims... they just don't seem to be written well at all, fun, but not written well.

The Sims 1, on my grannies computer, still runs like crap, with a gig of RAM, and an AthlonXP 2500, with a 6200 series Nvidia. I've seen the sims run, very slowly, on a 133Mhz pentium, with 32mb of RAM, it still ran though... Puttin it on such a superior machine such as grannies should have made it run flawlessly, but it seems like, since those types of games rely so heavily on scripts, you need dual quad cores just to run them smoothly. One reason it runs like crap on grannies computer is that it has ALL the expansion packs on it, and about a million houses and families (she loves the sims). Any time you buy one of these maxis games, you may as well accept the fact that they usually run poorly. The last maxis game I owned that ran smoothly was SimCity2000, haha.

It's mostly cpu for SimCity4 though, having a Nvidia card helps though, I guess, It helped me out a lot. Google "simcity 4 choppy on ATI" and see what you find....

I was kinda curious about societies.... but I forgot to look it up, sad that its not made by maxis. Maxis is good, it just seems like their games always run a lot slower than they should. But if you get a system thats "just right" they will run flawlessly I guess. Hopefully societies will actually have some hardware support, it's pretty much mandatory these days.

Sim's 4 is a very low spec game, you shouldn't be getting lag at all, but you mentioned skipping in sound, this indicates a CPU bottleneck more than a graphical one, and P4 Prescotts are more than crappy for today's standards.

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Just my two cents . . . but on a system that's setup well, a Pentium 4 is still capable of playing modern games at a decent rate (I can manage an average 24FPS in Crysis at 1280x768 single GPU with all settings high and no AA/AF).

Honestly, the first thing I would do would be to do an optimized defrag of the HDD.

Also, make sure you don't have any anti-virus, anti-malware software running in the background.

Make sure to check that your audio drivers are current and up to date, too.

If you can, and feel up to it, go into the system BIOS and check to see if you have a setting for "PCI Latency". If so, you can bump it up a step, that might help the audio processor keep an enough extra BUS bandwidth to handle it's work.

I think I found the problem, I have a replacement MotherBoard on order. I think I damaged my 478 Socket a while back, I didn't think of it at the time I posted this thread. I'll see how things go in about 5 days. Thanks for all the reply's. And my 9800 and X1650 with a 3.0 P4 ran the game fine too, but like I said I forgot about the socket damage during my X1650's service time. Hope my CPU doesn't get hurt if it gets pulled out with the heatsink again. I think I'll cry, or have a breakdown if I mess something else up on this PC.

I've tried several drivers with ATi cards.
With a X1800XT and HD3870 the game is unplayable on both systems, wich are completely different. With a 9800PRO, 7900GT and 8800GT the game runs perfectly fine on both systems, without doing a single change but swaping the cards (and drivers if needed).

What I found:
I can't play SimCity on ATi cards. I didn't tried to lower the in-game graphics quality, it should run with everything on max... it's an old game.

well i noticed a huge jump when i set mine to 3x the size of my ram, but if you have more than 4GB's it shouldn't be needed unless you exceed 3.5GB's worth of plugins.

If you have a heavily modded game then remember that the amount of plugins you have will be loaded into your ram, and then your page file. so if you have 2GB's of ram, on a Vista PC and lets say 2.5GB's of plugins, then the first 512 goes to the os, then the next 1.5GB's goes to the game, and the remaining 1GB goes to the page file. That's how it was explained to me anyways.

I found that during Simcity 4 gameplay my HD3850 doesn't switch to 3D mode (higher core clock and GDDR clock).
So I overclocked it permanently in Rivatuner. Game is a bit smoother, but it doesn't help much. It's a great game, but awfully optimized. It seems to stress CPU pretty much, but graphic card seems to be without load for most of the time.

I found that during Simcity 4 gameplay my HD3850 doesn't switch to 3D mode (higher core clock and GDDR clock).
So I overclocked it permanently in Rivatuner. Game is a bit smoother, but it doesn't help much. It's a great game, but awfully optimized. It seems to stress CPU pretty much, but graphic card seems to be without load for most of the time.

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I find its more of a Ram and HDD related thing in my experience. I wonder why it doesn't switch to 3d though. Going to give it a try.